WORKSHOP: Gelli Plate Printing

Sunday, October 18th, 12pm – 3pm, 2026
$140  Non-Members
$125  VCP Members
(Register online below)

Tap into the playful fun of creating photo transfers through non-toxic gel plate printing. Over three hours, participants will explore the expressive potential of combining photographic images with color and texture, exploring composition, surfaces, and layering techniques to create original works of art. No previous printmaking experience is required. This class is designed for photographers and creative people working in any medium. This is a beginner class that requires no previous experience.

We’ll begin with a short introduction to the use of a gelli plate: how to apply inks, layer compositions, and manipulate negative space with your images.
An example of the Gelli Plate process can be viewed here. 

 

Through experiment and play, participants will:

      • Discover how to create monoprints using photos in combination with stamps, stencils, and texture.
      • Layer colors, textures, and impressions to evoke depth and luminosity
      • Explore techniques of ghost printing, registration, and overprinting

At the close of the session, we’ll share and reflect on the prints.

 

What’s Provided:

      • Gelli plates
      • Acryllics 
      • Brayers
      • Paper
      • Basic studio tools.

 

What’s Needed:

      • 10-20 black and white laser-printed photos.
      • A notebook or sketchbook, plus a pencil.
      • An apron or smock and clothes you don’t mind getting inky

 

Outcomes & Inspiration: 

By the end of the session, each participant will leave with a small suite of original prints reflecting their direct engagement with material play. More than just finished prints, the process offers a way to slow down and engage in a tactile, receptive dialogue with a uniquely fun process.

 

 

About the Instructor

Shelley Kirkwood is an American photographer and writer whose work engages the natural world as a site of observation, transformation, and temporal experience. Her practice spans nineteenth- through twenty-first-century photographic traditions, moving fluidly between cameraless and lens-based processes. Grounded in an ongoing inquiry into time understood both as a physical dimension of change and as a subjective, perceptual condition shaped by memory, attention, and emotion, Kirkwood’s recent work expresses time and memory as layered phenomena articulated through light, movement, and material.

Kirkwood received a BA in Photography from Hampshire College and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her early years in New England, along with professional experience in the curatorial departments of the Center for Creative Photography and the High Museum of Art, have shaped her interdisciplinary perspective and engagement with visual culture. Since her first exhibition at the Midtown Y Gallery in New York in 1994, her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally.

She lives and works in a restored nineteenth-century church in western Massachusetts, where seasonal shifts and the surrounding rural landscape continue to inform her practice.

 

Find a complete list of upcoming workshops and events at VCP here. 

 

Online Registration

 

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